NORTH BY NORTHWEST

Revisited Hitchcock's NORTH BY NORTHWEST (1959) last weekend and even on the House's less-than-stellar video it captivated me yet again. It's a movie I've returned to many times in the three decades it's been in my life. Made by Hitchcock during his peak period (and coming on the heels of VERTIGO, a psychologically complex and hugely personal statement), it could have been a throwaway comedy-thriller. But Hitchcock and many of his key collaborators were in too powerful a groove to just throw a project off. Screenwriter Ernest Lehman joined Team Hitchcock with this picture, with the declared goal of writing the ULTIMATE Hitchcock thriller - the script takes in many of Hitchcock's favorite themes (the wrongly-accused protagonist chief among them), and gives everyone involved a chance to take their game to another level: Cary Grant, in his final film for Hitchcock, carries the lead thru sheer charm; Bernard Herrmann follows up his operatic music for VERTIGO with a score more than suitable to accompany the dance Grant must make across half the US; and cinematographer Robert Burks continues to expand his palette across urban landscapes, desolate cornfields and (thrillingly) the faces of Mount Rushmore.

But I wanna talk about Eva, and Eve.

Eve Kendall is the protagonist of her own picture: the story of a party girl at a crossroads, pressured by the government into an undercover assignment. (Another recurring Hitchcock type: Eve would have an interesting conversation with NOTORIOUS' Alicia Huberman.) She seems close enough to Philip Vandamm to know the trouble that George Kaplan is causing him, and must have raised an eyebrow when George Kaplan suddenly had a face, splashed over the newspapers. Perhaps she puts on the same face she always wore for Vandamm when she runs into Roger Thornhill on the train. She's seductive but icy, intimate but not easy to know. Roger doesn't understand quite why this incredible woman is helping him. And Eve's poker face is so strong that he doesn't realize how hard she's working to keep him alive.

As breezily as the whole thing moves, it takes a few viewings to really grasp the depth of Eve's story. And keeping all of the above in mind, it's clear that Eva Marie Saint has internalized it all, and behind her fully composed masque she's calculating all the steps she's going to have to take to keep this idiot from being murdered. She starts to crack in the auction house sequence, clearly hurt when Roger expresses his bitterness over what he believes to be her betrayal (and probably frustrated and angry) and trying to keep her emotions at bay. (She's keeping it inside, but she's dancing every bit as hard as Roger.)

There's a relief that comes when Roger and Eve meet face-to-face in some Keystone forest, at last on the same page and at the same point in time. Though surrounded by thick trees they finally, truly see each other. They're still beset by an incredibly hostile and dangerous world, reflected in the increasingly distorted and disturbed faces of Mount Rushmore they must scale during the movie's climax, but even in this moment, maybe the most traumatized expression by Hitchcock of a world in chaos and uproar, Roger and Eve are finally dancing together.